81 Facts About Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam was an American abstract painter, sculptor, and arts educator.

Originally associated with the Washington Color School, a group of Washington-area artists that developed a form of abstract art from color field painting in the 1950s and 1960s, Sam Gilliam moved beyond the group's core aesthetics of flat fields of color in the mid-60s by introducing both process and sculptural elements to his paintings.

Sam Gilliam has been recognized as the first artist to have "freed the canvas" from the stretcher in this specific way, putting his paintings in conversation with the architecture of their settings.

Sam Gilliam produced art in a range of styles and materials, exploring the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and printmaking.

Sam Gilliam's work has since been described as lyrical abstraction.

Sam Gilliam said that his father worked variously as "a farmer, a baseball pitcher, a deacon, a janitor," in addition to being a hobbyist carpenter; his mother was a school teacher, cared for the large family, and was an active member of the neighborhood sewing group.

At a young age, Sam Gilliam wanted to be a cartoonist and spent most of his time drawing with encouragement from his mother.

Sam Gilliam attended Central High School in Louisville, and graduated in 1951.

Wilke helped spark Sam Gilliam's growing interest in German Expressionists like Klee and Emil Nolde, and encouraged him to pursue a similar style.

Sam Gilliam later said that Wilke would often refuse to let him use oil paint in class because "I treated the canvas with too much respect;" Wilke had Sam Gilliam work with watercolors to learn to release some level of control in the painting process and allow for serendipity in the final product, as the medium can spread somewhat uncontrollably when applied.

Sam Gilliam staged his first ever solo art exhibition in 1956 at the university, the year following his graduation.

From 1956 to 1958 Sam Gilliam served in the United States Army, stationed in Yokohama.

Sam Gilliam's thesis, inspired by this group of artists working in a mode that embraced chance and accidents, was not well received by his advisor Crodel, who believed it was "too subjective," but Sam Gilliam still viewed Crodel as an important influence in the development of his work.

Sam Gilliam specifically credited Crodel for instilling in him both a respect for the relationship between students and teachers as well as the importance of the study of art history.

Sam Gilliam served on the executive board of the local chapter of the NAACP as a youth advisor and helped organize numerous sit-ins, pickets, and protests against segregation, often in conjunction with local Unitarian churches.

Sam Gilliam was arrested and jailed on several occasions for non-violent civil disobedience.

Butler earned her master's degree from Columbia while Sam Gilliam remained in Louisville, and he traveled to New York to visit her often, where he became interested in work by Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko.

In December 1963 Sam Gilliam was hospitalized in Louisville, in connection with anxiety he felt about his artistic career; he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium.

In 1964, Sam Gilliam began developing a series of paintings that experimented with hard-edge and color field styles, with precise geometric fields of color similar to those of Washington Color School painters like Downing, Gene Davis, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland, who had been influenced in turn by the soak-stain painting techniques of Helen Frankenthaler.

Binstock has argued that Sam Gilliam's work was informed in large part by Downing and his relationship to the formation of the movement; unlike Louis and Noland, Downing had not yet been championed by art critic Clement Greenberg, whose praise had been instrumental in elevating the Washington School painters.

Sam Gilliam showed his early hard-edge experiments in 1964 in his second solo exhibition at The Adams Morgan Gallery, his first show of exclusively abstract art.

Sam Gilliam went through several distinct stages working in this style, starting with a series of solid color field paintings that were bisected by diagonal stripes of alternating color, separated by thin lines of bare canvas, inspired by Gene Davis' extensive use of the stripe motif and by Morris Louis' final series of striped abstractions.

In 1965, Sam Gilliam showed his new hard-edge paintings in a solo exhibition at Jefferson Place Gallery, one of Washington's most well-known commercial galleries in the 1960s.

Sam Gilliam only sold one painting from the exhibition, which did not see much critical attention or success, but his relationship with the gallery continued for another eight years.

Sam Gilliam was able to leave his teaching position at McKinley to focus on his painting in the run-up to the exhibition, thanks to an individual artist's grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which he used to purchase a home in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood.

Sam Gilliam began teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1967.

In preparing for the exhibition, Sam Gilliam revisited his fluid experimentations from the previous weeks and discovered a study he later titled Green Slice, a watercolor work on washi from early 1967 that he said he couldn't remember making, an indication of the speed at which he was producing studies and experiments.

Sam Gilliam began creating paintings without a predetermined structure like his earlier abstractions, instead focusing on the physical process of painting, working quickly to pour watered-down acrylic over canvases laid on the floor, moving the pools of paint around and into each other by physically manipulating the canvases, allowing a composition to appear by both improvisation and chance.

At this point Sam Gilliam created and formalized his Slice series.

Sam Gilliam drew on the approach of Green Slice by folding the canvases on top of themselves to create clear "slices" and bisected pools of color throughout the compositions before crumpling them in piles to dry, sometimes splashing additional paint on while they lay drying, adding several elements of chance into the final image.

Sam Gilliam pointed out for us how Ron Davis was using the Plexiglas and allowing it to float right in space by putting it on this beveled edge.

Sam Gilliam began increasing the size of his Slice paintings, eventually reaching a size that could fill entire walls.

Sock-It-to-Me was so heavy it destroyed the wall, and Sam Gilliam said that the gallery owner temporarily shut off the lights at the opening as a gesture to show that he believed the work was too large to be sellable.

Sam Gilliam offered several different explanations later in his life, and eventually directly refuted the laundry origin story.

In 1969 Gilliam presented several large Slice paintings in the group exhibition X to the Fourth Power, alongside work by William T Williams, Melvin Edwards, and Stephan Kelsey, at the newly established Studio Museum in Harlem.

Sam Gilliam later explained that the paintings were not meant to be understood as abstract portraits of King:.

In 1970, Sam Gilliam was hospitalized for anxiety and depression for a second time.

Sam Gilliam's paintings were shown in Venice alongside the work of Diane Arbus, Ron Davis, Richard Estes, Jim Nutt, and Keith Sonnier.

Sam Gilliam was the third African-American artist to represent the United States in a show at the Biennale; he is often cited as the first but was preceded by artists Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis in 1956.

Sam Gilliam re-staged and recycled the painted polypropylene from Autumn Surf multiple times over the following decade in modified configurations and with new additions for different exhibitions, sometimes with new titles when reinstalled; the piece was exhibited through 1982 under its original title as well as Niagara and Niagara Extended.

Around this time Sam Gilliam began experimenting with assemblage, culminating with Dark as I Am, a mixed-media work that existed in the artist's studio in various forms for five years before he exhibited it as an immersive installation at Jefferson Place Gallery in November 1973.

Sam Gilliam nailed his painting boots to a wooden board placed on the ground, hung his denim jacket on the wall next to the door, scrawled crayon on the walls, and attached a pair of sunglasses to the light fixture in the small gallery.

The title Jail Jungle was a phrase one of Sam Gilliam's daughters thought up while walking through a run-down neighborhood on her way to school.

Sam Gilliam was included in the Corcoran's 34th Biennial of Contemporary American Painting in February 1975, debuting Three Panels for Mr Robeson, named for the singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson.

Two years prior, Butler, while still writing for The Washington Post, had begun research for a biography on Robeson when their young daughter Melissa noticed her mother's excitement and wrote Robeson a letter asking him to be interviewed, inspiring Sam Gilliam to begin his own project honoring Robeson.

Sam Gilliam reported feeling great stress after installing Three Panels and other large works around the country, and his psychiatrist prescribed him Dalmane for anxiety, which he took for the first time before boarding his flight.

Sam Gilliam then cut long sections from these canvases and collaged them in horizontal or vertical arrangements, disrupting the patterns on their surfaces.

In 1977 Sam Gilliam completed his first formal engagement with land art during an artist residency at the Artpark State Park in upstate New York.

Sam Gilliam adjusted his collage technique, cutting one or more shapes from paintings in progress and collaging them in a central position onto a separate, larger, brightly stained and traditionally stretched canvas.

Sam Gilliam continued experimenting with new surface qualities and textures, using different paints, hardeners, and physical materials in a specific combination he later said he could no longer remember, producing layered black compositions on top of the collage that resembled rocky tar or asphalt and extended over the beveled edges of the rectangular canvases.

Iterating on what he explored in the textures of his Black Paintings, by 1980 Sam Gilliam had begun to further build up the surfaces of the canvases with additional collaged pieces and colors beyond black and white.

Sam Gilliam experimented with stretching the stained and collaged canvases over irregular polygonal beveled stretchers each with nine distinct edges, before covering them with raked fields of paint, producing seventeen of these new forms that he called Chasers.

Sam Gilliam adjusted his approach to shaped canvases with his Red and Black series, produced by constructing multiple sharply angular geometric canvases all attached in a row, many of which can be displayed in multiple arrangements or installed around corners.

Sam Gilliam hired a second studio assistant around 1985 to help him complete these increasingly heavy and labor-intensive works, and by the 1990s his sculptured paintings had become more elaborate, taking the form of both free-standing sculptures and wall-based constructions.

Sam Gilliam started using new elements like piano and door hinges to create visual layers in different sections of the compositions, giving the works hinged panels that can be displayed folded in or out.

Additionally, several authors - and Sam Gilliam's family - rebutted the idea that his career truly declined, given the breadth of exhibitions he staged and participated in during the period, and suggested in retrospect that this was an overdramatized narrative.

Sam Gilliam was invited in 1997 to create an installation at the Kunstmuseum Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen in Magdeburg, Germany, inside the museum's historic chapel.

Sam Gilliam re-used the printed fabric he made with Weege, adding paint to the work before sewing it in strips from the chapel ceiling.

Sam Gilliam was the first artist to stage a solo exhibition at Washington's Kreeger Museum, in 1998.

Sam Gilliam built up thick surfaces of high-gloss acrylic with gel medium on wood to create wall-based works with polished, nearly reflective surfaces, some with puzzle-like insets of alternating rectangles.

Sam Gilliam staged his first full retrospective in 2005 at the Corcoran, curated by Binstock, who wrote Sam Gilliam's first monograph to accompany the exhibition.

Sam Gilliam sold his studio at 14th and U St NW - in a neighborhood that had experienced intense gentrification since he bought the property in 1979 - for $3.85 million in 2010, moving to a new building in the Sixteenth Street Heights neighborhood.

In conjunction with The Phillips Collection's 90th anniversary in 2011, Sam Gilliam was commissioned to create a site-specific installation for the large well next to the museum's interior elliptical spiral staircase, nearly 45 years after his debut solo museum show, at The Phillips in 1967.

For several years in the early 2010s, Sam Gilliam dealt with severe health complications from his long-term use of lithium to treat his bipolar disorder, which had extensively damaged his kidneys and brought on several years of depression.

Sam Gilliam staged an exhibition of his early hard-edge abstract paintings in 2013 at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles, curated by the younger artist Rashid Johnson, which brought a new wave of national media attention to his work.

Sam Gilliam's painting, Yet Do I Marvel, Countee Cullen, comprises a series of glossy geometric colored rectangles of acrylic on wood in the style he began exploring in the mid-2000s, and was inspired by the Harlem Renaissance writer Countee Cullen's poem which serves as the work's title.

Sam Gilliam himself said that "rising prices" during this period gave him more freedom to pursue new, large works.

Sam Gilliam began to show his work more frequently in New York, staging his first solo exhibition in the city in nearly 20 years, an exhibition of historical works at Mnuchin Gallery, in 2017.

Sam Gilliam then exhibited a series of new watercolor paintings at the FLAG Art Foundation in 2019.

Sam Gilliam was scheduled to present a full-career retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, in 2020, but the exhibition was delayed and reworked due to the pandemic.

In 1962, Sam Gilliam married Dorothy Butler, a Louisville native and the first African-American female columnist at The Washington Post.

Sam Gilliam died of renal failure at his home in DC, on June 25,2022, at the age of 88.

Sam Gilliam's work was broadly acclaimed during his lifetime and he received numerous awards and grants.

Sam Gilliam received eight honorary doctorates, including from his alma mater the University of Louisville, in 1980, and he was named the 2006 alumnus of the year.

Sam Gilliam was awarded the Art Institute of Chicago's Norman Walt Harris Prize, the Kentucky Governor's Award in the Arts, and the State Department's inaugural Medal of Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015 for his longtime contributions to the Art in Embassies Program; his work was shown in embassies and diplomatic facilities in over 20 countries during his career.

Sam Gilliam received multiple NEA grants starting in 1967, and he participated in numerous fellowships and artist-in-residence programs, including at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1968 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971.

Sam Gilliam regularly staged exhibitions in the United States and internationally.

Sam Gilliam staged a series of three-artist shows with Melvin Edwards and William T Williams titled Interconnections at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Extensions at the Wadsworth Atheneum; Resonance at Morgan State University; and Epistrophy at Pace Gallery.

Sam Gilliam exhibited and sold his work through a broad array of galleries in Washington, throughout the United States, and internationally, and his career was marked by multiple periods of both rising and stagnating interest in - and prices for - his work.

Sam Gilliam's painting Lady Day II sold at auction in November 2018 at Christie's in New York for $2.17 million, a record for the artist.

Sam Gilliam was represented in Paris by gallerist Darthea Speyer from 1970 until she closed her practice in the 2000s, Gilliam's longest continuous relationship with any gallery.